“Ma foi, monsieur l’abbé, I know nothing at all about it. Bercy is perfectly quiet. This quarter is no less so. I do not understand it. They ordered us to come, and we had to obey.”
“But did you not at Bercy have confidence in M. Thiers as well as we? Do you prefer Assi, Flourens, Blanqui, and Felix Pyat to him?”
“Our employers have always spoken very highly of him. The good workmen call him a great patriot, and not a mere pretender like so many others. He promised us liberty and work, and would certainly have kept his word. So we have committed a great piece of foolishness in allowing him to go to Versailles. God grant it may not be for a long time!”
“But what becomes of your work all this time? Do you think this state of thing favorable to the interests of the workman?”
“Ah, monsieur l’abbé, work is a thing but little thought of now, and yet the longer we delay resuming it, the more unfortunate we are. There are among us so many sluggards and madcaps!...”
My excellent guard was explaining to me in his own way how the bad workmen, who wished in 1848 to obtain the right to labor, had, since the
siege of Paris, wished to retain the right of doing nothing, when I found myself at the spot whence we had set out. Immediately resuming his most official and patronizing air—“Citizen,” said he to the patrol that guarded the entrance to the Place Vendôme, “let this citizen pass!”
I had promised the family of the poor sick man to visit him again in two or three days. Complicated as the situation of Paris was, and in particular that of the Place Vendôme, treated and occupied as a place taken by storm, in defiance of all right and all decency, by the national guards of the faubourgs in revolt against the laws, I was far from anticipating that I should hasten the next day to the same place in the midst of all the horrors of civil war, to carry the consolations of religion to the honorable inhabitants of Paris, smitten down without any provocation, without any motive, by the bullets of their fellow-citizens.